Topical Tropes

These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.

Angst? What Angst?: No one in the film seems particularly upset a few seconds after watching someone die. Even the orphaned children seem more interested in their next meal than what happened to their parents.

Kevin Murphy: Man, these kids are hardcore. I once cried for nine hours because my mom would't let me watch Bozo The Clown.

The only exception is Ramsey when his girlfriend is killed. He is shown to be angered by her death, and it's implied to be the reason behind him trying to save the people on the tour bus.

Ramsey's guns, which he apparently kept in his van. He says that he used to be a Marine but he quit because he was tired of killing, which only sort of explains why he's always armed to the teeth.

Rod suddenly finds fishing equipment in the back of the van they've been using to escape the birds.

Rod: Hey, look! A fishing rod! I can go catch some fish! [...] Oh look, a stove! We can cook it!

Bad Bad Acting: Alan Bagh (who plays Rod) seems hyperconscious of the camera, trying his hardest not to look into it. The fellows at RiffTrax imply he's an alien learning to walk like a human for the first time. The Village Voice review says it seems like Bagh is in his first class of ESL.

Broken Aesop: The kids are supposed to look bratty for wanting a happy meal, rather than the food Rod had cooked, but likely would have gotten poisoned from the unprepared fish Rod had cooked.

Considering it consisted of unprepared fish cooked with seaweed Nathalie randomly found on the beach and according to Birdemic 2 it killed Susan (the little girl), I think finding a McDonald's not being attacked by gif birds would be the better solution.

Rod doesn't bother cleaning the fish when plopping it in a bucket of water to cook. No wonder the kids are squicked.

There's also the ornithologist who refers to himself as an "orthologist", which means someone who speaks correctly or who makes the correct use of words. The irony is delicious.

There are many serious ecological concerns associated with global climate change, from abnormally short or long seasons to widespread flooding to powerful hurricanes to morepoison ivy. However, "exploding mutant birds" is not one of them.

The mutated birds all sound like bald eagles, which is ironic considering that bald eagles are almost always dubbed with another species of bird with a more impressive screech.

James Nguyen obviously had no idea how big a deal being a Victoria's Secret cover model is - in terms of money or prestige. He makes it seem like just another model job.Note To put it in perspective, a Victoria's Secret model being paid at the LOW end of the scale is still making several million dollars per year.

Designated Hero: Rod. He's not strong. He's not charismatic. In fact, he barely seems to have the intelligence to dress himself.

Hilarious in Hindsight: The opening theme is stock music that gamers who played Hollywood Mogul would recognize is one of the available tunes for their fictional films.

Idiot Plot: Swarms of eagles are attacking people everywhere, yet the main characters drive out to the country, repeatedly getting out of the car for impromptu picnics. Any time anyone is inside a car, they leave the windows rolled down. The entire movie could have been resolved by staying indoors.

The number of times people enter cars, leave cars, pull to the side of the road or merge back onto the road. You will eventually reach the point where every time a character enters a car your body will tense up as though your torturer has just returned with heated pliers.

Even when they're on foot, there's an excessive number of scenes showing people walking to different places. As though we'd have no idea how Rod got from his parking spot to the restaurant if they didn't show every step of the way.

The board room scene is clearly the same scene repeated three or four times from different angles, making the padding even more apparent.

A dead bird is a cartoon clip art of a bird superimposed on the screen.

Most of the "flying" birds are just superimposed animated .GIFs of the same bird.

Kevin: Pff! The birds in Galaga look more realistic than those things.

The birds don't so much "fly" as "hover while slowly flapping their wings". They look worse than the aerial mounts in World of Warcraft. Far worse.

Enjoy the "television news set" on the news program Rod watches at home. The video clips they show still have the Getty Images watermark on them!

The spontaneous forest fire consists of several small fire and smoke animations randomly stuck on trees.

Kevin: Help, it's a strangely localized forest fire!

Bill: With small pinpoint blazes that are not spreading in the least! Help!

Mike: And which are handily contained to tiny patches off the road itself making safe passage quite easy! Help!

The guns' recoil, muzzle flash, and sound effects are almost never timed so that any two of them occur at the same time. And instead of making the birds an unseen, mysterious enemy, which would have worked on their budget, the birds are always shown in broad daylight, for long, extended takes, revealing every possible flaw in their looping animations.

A minor one, but extremely bizarre: Nathalie's cell phone was apparently on vibrate, but Nguyen apparently decided to give in a ringtone in ADR. Said ringtone is a ringing mechanical bicycle bell. Yeah, it's technically possible in 2008, but is that really the best Nguyen could come up with?

Many obviously botched lines were left in such as "part-times Eagles fan" and "you're a cats lover".

Nguyen also completely ignored sound mixing or even taking a normal room tone, which is why the background would change during editing. For example, during the scene with Tom Hill, you could hear a brook babbling behind him when the shot was on him, but the sound of water would vanish when the camera was off him.

The credits of this movie claim there was an editor, but there's not much evidence of one. The majority of scenes end on long, awkward silences where everyone stands around waiting for the director to call cut, flubbed lines are cut off in mid-sentence and spliced right into the retake, and wedged between two early scenes are a few frames of a car sitting in a parking lot, which either nobody noticed or bothered to trim out completely.

In fact, it seems the "editing" consisted of stopping filming and starting filming from another angle. In other words, there was no cutting or splicing (or video editing since the entire film was done on digital video.)

You can see some of the forest fire bits vanish before the scene ends, or freeze completely.

Whitney Moore, Nathalie's actress, obviously couldn't make herself take the movie seriously either. She's trying to hold back laughter in almost every scene she's in and giggles the whole time at the sheer stupidity. The audience is likely doing the same.

During a massive bird attack, the first thing you want to do is have a nice picnic on the beach. Hey, they're extremely lucky that birds hate picnics and beaches.

The trapped people in a bus don't bother to hide when two fellows with automatic rifles start firing wildly trying to shoot birds. Rather, they keep their heads exposed screaming and pounding on bus windows. These same people then leave the safety of the bus and STAND STILL in the open waiting to be attacked, although Ramsey sort of forced them out of the bus, and had no real plan on what to do next.

At one point, a man tries to steal gas from Rod and the other survivors at gunpoint. After getting the gas, the man is killed by a bird. Rod drives off, and leaves the gas can, as well as the abandoned weapon on the side of the road.

The birds are reportedly making particular targets of cars on the highway. So of course, loads of people are driving down the highway with the windows rolled down.

Special mention goes to Becky's decision to go number two in the middle of an open field, when she could have just used the bathroom at the picnic area like Nathalie did. Sure enough, it gets her killed.

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